How to connect to Windows shared drives with your N95

byRoss McKilloponOctober 16, 2008

During the short time that I’ve been writing these tutorials for Simple Help, I have had many occasions where I wanted to copy files from my laptop to my N95 quickly and easily. Even though I don’t use Windows much, I thought perhaps somebody had written a client for the N95 that will connect to folders shared through Windows File and Print Sharing, so I started Googling around. I came across two such applications. SymSMB is available as a time bombed evaluation version and SMB4S60 is an open source (free) application. Seeing how I’m into open source software, I decided to give SMB4S60 a try, and it works fantastically.

Now that you have Python for S60 installed, download a copy of SMB4S60 (latest version at time of writing is v0.0.1). I have included a Mobile Code below for direct over the air installation. See my tutorial on Mobile Codes if you’re not familiar with them.

Please note that SMB4S60 must be installed to your phones internal memory, not the mass memory. It will not work if you install it to the mass memory.

Now that you have SMB4S60 installed, it’s time to connect to a remote folder. Select Menu -> Applications -> Smb4S60 and select the Internet access point you would like to use.

Now select New Host and enter the NetBIOS name of the remote host.

Next, you will be prompted for your user name and password on the remote host.

Assuming you didn’t make any mistakes entering your user name or password, you should now see a list of shares available to you. For the purposes of this tutorial, I created a share called ‘tmp’.

After browsing into the appropriate share, simply navigate to the file you would like to download and press the Center toggle. SMB4S60 will prompt you for the destination path where you would like this file saved. The default of E:\downloads\ works for me.

Now open File Manager by selecting Menu -> Tools -> File Mgr, press the Right toggle to switch to mass memory, scroll down to the downloads folder and open it with the Center toggle. Here you’ll find the file you just downloaded.

An interesting feature of SMB4S60 is that once you successfully connect to a remote host, its NetBIOS name along with your user name and password are saved. You can simply reconnect by selecting it from the main SMB4S60 menu.

I personally don’t like this idea and I did find a way to remove this information from the phone. SMB4S60 saves it’s configuration in a plain text file called .config within a folder called .smb4s60 on your phones mass memory (note the leading dot (.) in both names). If you would like to delete this data, open the File Manager as above, browse to the mass memory, find the .smb4s60 folder and delete it and its contents.

SMB4S60 does have a couple of limitations.

It doesn’t support connecting to Windows Vista shares. (Yet?)

It wouldn’t connect to Samba v3.2.3, the default with Fedora 9. I had to fire up an old Fedora Core 4 box with Samba v3.0.23a in order to write this tutorial. Hopefully this is the same issue as connecting to Vista (?)

It can only download files _from_ a remote host. It can not upload files. (Again, yet?)

Considering the fact that the SMB4S60 developer admits that this application was literally written in one day, I think he’s done a great job!

Thanks for the interesting review and presentation for us this interesting application that at some point may grow up to something more significant.
When it comes to mentioning SymSMB, then I guess, the author of the review just forget to call SMB4S60 rather as a features limited software. From the variety of features and options provided by both application, from the author point of view the only price is worth to talk about. In his opinion everything became automatically better as soon as it is free, like a free mattress. Doesn’t it?

I can’t speak on behalf of the author, but I think his point is that he would rather support open source software than closed source.

There are certainly times when purchasing closed source software is the “right” thing to do. But if an open source application meets your needs, why pay for bells and whistles that you’re not going to use?